22 Oct / Beauty by Christina Chiu [in Library Journal]
Judge Gish Jen anointed Beauty, Christina Chiu’s first fiction since her award-winning 2001 collection, Troublemaker and Other Stories, for the Santa Fe Writers Project’s James Alan McPherson Award, enabling publication from 2040 Books. A simple summary reveals Amy Wong’s trajectory from an unmoored Manhattan 16-year-old to a powerful septuagenarian fashion doyenne. Presenting the story chronologically but not particularly linearly, Chiu divulges Amy’s life in unpredictable segments, willing the reader to piece together what happened in the blank spaces between chapters.
Narrator Catherine Ho agilely matures with her protagonist: She’s an emotionally abandoned teen – Amy’s father disappears, her mercurial mother is unreliable, her achievement-oriented older sister distant – who’s predatorially seduced as payment for a pair of luxury boots; she’s a twice-divorced, devoted mother of one son she birthed, the other who claimed her; she’s an ambitious corporate creative; she’s a grandmother determined to protect her talented granddaughter’s future. Manipulated by her mother and mentors, but most especially by weak men who use her body, mind, and heart to assuage their own failings, Amy refuses to succumb (for long), tenaciously achieving her greatest dreams.
Beauty – in its myriad meanings – elucidates this artist-as-a-determined-woman through the decades.
Review: modified from “Audio,” Library Journal, October 1, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020